This week I am the curator of the Gateway Antarctica Twitter account. It is quite challenging because I want to talk about history and I see now how much I already covered over the years of doing research on Polar history. I want to talk about the expeditions which are not commonly known like the expeditions undertaken by Germany, Scotland, France, Belgium, Sweden, Australia, Japan, etc. Their contribution to science was immense and we still build on it our own research. Otto Nordenskjoeld discovered through observation of ice that there is a difference to land ice and ice shelves – he called it shelf ice but it was changed in the 1950s to ice shelf. Research on ice and snow was mainly the work of the geologists back in the days. It fascinates me every time I encounter publications of these explorers how they did research through observation and developed – often the correct – conclusions with the limited instruments they had available. Today, ice and snow research is done via remote sensing and in situ measurements. And still – the more we discover, the more questions appear. This is the fascination of research if it is in history, humanities, social sciences and hard science (STEM).
Dr Ursula Rack 